Election 2016: Thoughts in the Aftermath

This is how libertarians feel after every election. We learn to live with it. So will you.

2. I believe in free trade. Trump doesn’t. I’m for a strong First Amendment. He isn’t. I want to reduce the size of government. He wants to make more of it. I think he’s divisive and mean and uniquely unfit to be president. He emboldens an unnerving group of racists, xenophobes and misogynists better relegated to the fringes. And since he will be serving with a Republican-controlled House and Senate, I won’t even get gridlock.

3. We all have a choice about where to focus our emotions. POTUS is one office in one branch of government at one level. Last night, good things happened — amazingly good things, things so amazingly good they brought tears to my eyes — in down ballot races and on ballot issues.

4. There is no denying some of Trump’s supporters are racist, misogynistic xenophobes. But that’s NOT the ONLY source of his support. For people who literally don’t know the reasons that non-bigots support Trump — because they won’t accept that such people exist — maybe instead of dismissing the world as a terrible, awful, irredeemable place that you weep to explain to your children, maybe try something else:

Listen to what his supporters are saying and engage in some self-reflection.

5. Listen when they say the jobs have left their areas. That they can’t afford their health insurance premiums or the penalties for not having it. They can’t afford their tax rates. They can’t afford to take their kids to see the doctor, can’t afford to take vacations with their families, live in fear one-paycheck-to-the-next of missing their mortgage payment. Listen when they say they are afraid of losing jobs to overseas and to immigration. Listen when they say they are afraid of terrorism inside the U.S. Listen, and don’t reflexively dismiss their concerns as closet racism.

6. Listen when they say how seriously they take their right to own and bear arms. Don’t reflexively dismiss them as redneck fetishists. Don’t sneer on social media about how they must have some anatomical shortcoming for which to compensate. Listen when they say they will die on the hill of the Second Amendment because they are afraid of an authoritarian leader taking control of the country.
That burning?
That’s irony.

7. Listen, as well, to why they didn’t like the other candidate. How they feel about entrenched political dynasties who sell access to make millions, who conspire to rig the economy for their friends in the 1%, and do nothing while the poor and middle class fall further behind. Dismissing those concerns as manufactured manifestations of sexism is lazy.

8. You guys could have had Jim Webb. Are you even kidding me? Jim. Webb. Instead, you nominated an intensely disliked career politician with serious ethical shortcomings and no real vision to fix the problems facing our country. A war hawk and a drug warrior who is as bad as Trump on the First Amendment and worse on the Second.

9. Have we learned yet that money doesn’t buy elections?

10. There are reasons our founders gave the Executive branch limited powers and implemented a system of checks and balances. Voters and politicians who turn their heads at expansions of powers while their own people are in office — welp … chickens … coming home … to roost.

13. Jocelyn Baker called this shit a year ago. Her basis: wide support for Trump among far-left multiculturalist types in Los Angeles. “That…doesn’t make sense,” you say. Who cares? It happened.* Your mission, should you choose to take it, is to figure out why.

14. Now who “threw away” their vote?

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*I don’t mean he won California. I mean his wide support among that group suggested something was going on that traditional paradigms didn’t explain.